Nipped in the Bud (32 page)

“Men who live alone!” sniffed Miss Withers. She doggedly continued her explorations, still seeking the source of that muffled howling. Turning from the kitchen, she came into a little hallway opening into a sybaritic bathroom with a black sunken tub, with big fuzzy towels marked “His,” “Theirs” and “Its,” and a wall cabinet overflowing with medicines, ointments, mouthwashes and vitamin pills—a veritable pharmacopoeia. The roll of toilet tissue was imprinted with gay jokes, purple limericks and La Parisienne drawings.

There remained only the bedroom, which she entered with mounting apprehension. It was a big room, dim even in this early morning sunshine since the blinds were all drawn tight. The bedside phone suddenly started to yowl again; belatedly Miss Withers recognized it as the signal the telephone exchange sends out over the line when a receiver is left off the hook. No cats in trouble, anyway, she said to herself with relief. And then she saw
it
.

On an oversized, rumpled bed a man was lying, twisted and contorted. He was fully dressed in expensive, carefully chosen sports clothes; he had evidently ended the hard way. He was a big man in his thirties with curly, rumpled hair; he had died strangling, groping blindly for the telephone. “Swelled up like a poisoned pup,” whispered the schoolteacher, backing sensibly and hastily out of the room and hoping that she had left no fingerprints anywhere. She tiptoed out of the lonely house of death and made her way hastily back to her car, collecting Talley on the way.

“Here we go again,” she said to the dog. “Hold onto your hat.”

At any rate, as she told Mr. Cushak in his office a little later, it was no false alarm.

The studio executive swallowed, looking rather pale around the gills. “But—I can hardly believe it. This is impossible. No signs of violence, you say? Then it must just be an unfortunate coincidence; Reed had a heart attack and died a natural death.”

“The death,” Miss Withers advised him coldly, “was most unnatural from where I sit. I have no pretensions to being a pathologist, but the evidence is fairly clear. Reed was in excellent health and appetite and ate a copious breakfast day before yesterday. He came in to work, was suddenly taken ill, and rushed home to die there alone.”

“But—but how can this tie in? I mean, Reed didn’t even
receive
one of the valentines!”

Miss Withers shrugged her shoulders, then pulled Talley the poodle out of Mr. Cushak’s wastebasket, where the dog had been hopefully foraging. “There is more to this than meets the eye,” she said. “But I would very much like a chance to snoop around Larry Reed’s office or studio or whatever you call it before the police get here.”

Cushak winced. “Why—his office was Number 12 in the building across the street, on the second floor. His name is on the door. But—”

“And I want a chance to meet all the people who got the poison-pen valentines.”

“Very well. Of course. But—but you just mentioned the police. I suppose—yes, I must call them and report this.”

She gave him a mildly withering look. “I’ve already taken care of that; I stopped and phoned them on my way here, somewhat anonymously. Naturally I didn’t care at this particular time to be locked up as a material witness and I had no real right to be in the house anyway, so I’m afraid I intimated that I was the cleaning woman. Anyway, they have been alerted, and will do what has to be done. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll have a look at that office.”

Cushak nodded slowly. “Very well. You might even take over the office as a base of operations. I’ll arrange it. And I’ll assign one of our best writer-artists to work with you on the poodle story. If there’s anything else you need—”

There was a great deal else, but the schoolteacher wasn’t sure just what. Leaving Mr. Cushak staring moodily at his desk blotter, she led Talleyrand out of the office. They crossed Cartoon Alley, the wide street already bustling with a bewildering complexity of activities, and entered the boxlike office building across the way. It took Miss Withers some time to locate the cubicle that had been Larry Reed’s, for his name had already been erased from the door. An elderly gnome in coveralls was turning out the place at the moment. Pictures, books, pipes and tobacco—art materials, an amazingly complete collection of handy home remedies such as cough syrup and mineral oil and bicarbonate of soda and milk of magnesia and vitamin pills—everything was all being tumbled into paper cartons, helter-skelter.

“So soon?” gasped Miss Withers from the doorway.

The old man looked up in ghoulish glee. “Well, he got fired, didn’t he?” He nodded wisely. “They all get it sooner or later, and from where I sit the sooner the better. Playboy parasites, all of them.”

“You sound bitter, Mr.—?”

“Cassiday it is. Pop Cassiday, they call me now when they send me on errands. Once it was Jonathan H. Cassiday and I had my own bungalow on this lot. I been with the studio since it started with Uncle Carl working on a shoestring and making better pictures than anybody knows how to do nowadays, with all their wide screens and three dimensions and stuff. But they ruined movies when sound came in.” He came closer, a gap-toothed grin on his face. “Lady, I was a director in those days, believe it or not. Sound came in and they threw away action and pantomime for talk, talk, talk—they went and hired directors from Broadway plays and I went out with a knife between my shoulder blades. But everybody in this business gets that sooner or later.” He deftly slid the two filled cartons out into the hall. “You the new one coming in?”

Miss Withers started. “Why—why yes, in a way I suppose I am.”

“It’s a sorta madhouse,” confided the old man. “But maybe you’ll get used to it, if you last long enough. Most don’t.” He went out, leaving Miss Withers and the poodle alone in the bare little office. She sat down at the big tilted desk, switched the light off and on, and almost reached for the phone. Then she hesitated. Would her somewhat anomalous position here at the studio justify the expense of a long-distance call to New York?

Yet it was a time when she would have much appreciated the advice of her old friend and sparring partner, the Inspector. She thought about it from all angles, but it was hard to concentrate here in this little room, its walls crowded with great oblong sheets of framed cardboard on which there had been pinned hundreds of rough pencil sketches of something called
Peter Penguin’s Nightmare
, a thing full of sharks and crocodiles. This cartoon world seemed to have a different set of laws and traditions and a language all its own; to the schoolteacher it was an uncharted sea with rocks just beneath the surface, inhabited by anthropomorphic monsters leering crazily at her. Yet as she studied the drawings it all seemed to be beginning to make a sort of twisted sense; it was a world of A, with new rules.

One of the cartoon characters swallowed a pistol, and every time he hiccupped a shot was fired, never of course hitting anybody. A hippopotamus in green pants walked the plank of a pirate schooner; walked straight out into thin air and then back again to shout, “Avast, ye squabs!” at his bewildered persecutors. A scared rabbit, startled from its little “ramble-shack” in the hills, turned its ears into propeller blades and took off gaily into the wild blue yonder.

Never-never land. How on earth could a retired schoolteacher cope with people who thought in these formalized, wildly exaggerated terms? If they were capable of this, they’d be capable of anything….

It was a real relief to her some time later when her solitude was broken by the advent of a large, wholesome-looking man who introduced himself as Tip Brown. He was a bulky, solid, pink-faced man in his late thirties with a militantly boyish haircut and blunt, clever hands; he explained a bit diffidently that for his sins he had been sentenced to drop everything else and work here with her. Miss Withers liked him on sight—and for that reason mistrusted him, too, not being overly sure of first impressions.

After him came two studio workmen carrying a story board still grimy from the dust of the cellar vaults, and entitled
The Circus Poodle
. It was hung on the wall facing her desk, replacing one of the others.

Tip Brown looked at her quizzically. “You an old hand at this business?”

“A very new hand, a neophyte,” Miss Withers confessed.

“Then I guess I’d better explain,” he said. He did explain, with painstaking weariness, that each of the drawings pinned to the story board in this preliminary stage was supposed to represent a master scene in the picture, a high spot in the story. Other artists would later fill in the blanks between, which was why they were called “in-betweeners.” There were also the animators, who made the drawings that the original creators hadn’t bothered with—making things move and come alive.

“It’s a sort of complicated business, in case you didn’t know,” Tip Brown confided. “We do it over and over again, and never know just where we’re coming out.” He slumped into an easy chair by the window, a cold pipe dangling from his mouth, eyeing Miss Withers and Talley, too, with a certain amount of puzzled wonder. But he was game and shook Tally’s paw as often as it was offered. “So we’re going to have another whirl at the
Circus Poodle
headache,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me why the front office wants to dig up this one; it was a good story idea but somewhere it curdled. Anyhow, here we go, you and I and the pup. Do you
have
to sit in my lap, dog?” He gently shoved Talley to the floor. “And we’re in Larry Reed’s old office, too. He got the quick axe, I heard.”

“So I understood,” said the schoolteacher cautiously.

“And now
you
get your name on the door, eh? You must know where the body is buried.”

“But it isn’t even—” The schoolteacher bit her lip, realizing that the man was only speaking the vernacular, trying to put a newcomer at her ease. He had already taken out sketch pad and pencil, and was studying Talleyrand.

“You supposed to work with me on the new story line, or are you just here with the pup?” Tip wanted to know. Miss Withers cautiously admitted that she was not quite sure what her duties at the studio would amount to. The artist wryly said that sometimes nobody was sure. He prodded the poodle gently with an expensive oxford. “Can the beast do any tricks?”

Talleyrand, who like all his breed had been born to the grease paint and cap-and-bells of the clown, was delighted to show off his not inconsiderable repertoire. Tip Brown, somewhat visibly impressed, dashed off half a hundred sketches, pure simplified line and mass that got the big dog down on paper as no camera could ever have done; it was, Miss Withers realized as she peeked over the artist’s shoulder, the veritable essence of poodle. Evidently the young man liked to talk while he worked. “You see, ma’am, the story of
The Circus Poodle
is this; we start with this pampered pooch who belongs to a rich woman, elderly and eccentric, a sort of Hetty Green type….”

The schoolteacher suddenly realized that he was now sketching her, and not the dog at all. She bristled a little, but Tip Brown went blithely on. “This old biddy with her millions, she’s practically on her deathbed and because she may pop off any minute her ever-loving nieces and nephews begin to cluster around like vultures, none of them worth a hoot in hell but all hot-pants after a legacy. She can’t stand ’em, so on a whim she makes a will leaving everything in trust to the dog, who sleeps on a featherbed and eats only caviar and porterhouse steaks.”

“Yes, I see. But—”

“In this first sequence the poodle is clipped in the old-fashioned phony way, with pompoms on its legs and a ribbon in its hair—pampered darling stuff.” Tip’s pencil was flying, illustrating his words. A pile of discarded sheets began to pile up untidily on the floor beside him. “The heirs—I mean the ones who thought they’d inherit—don’t care much for losing out to a lap dog, so they have a conference and decide to slip Cuddles or whatever his name is some Rough-on-Rats in his afternoon tea. Only they forget the family parrot is in the room where they foment the dire plot. He is a character, a busybody, and he waits his chance and gleefully tips off the whole thing to the dog. So the poodle does a double take and saves his precious skin by turning down the tea and jumping headfirst out of the window. He goes off on the town, where he has a rough time of it, too.”

“Porterhouse steaks are difficult to come by these days,” admitted Miss Withers.

“Check, sister. Even at my salary I eat at hamburger joints, mostly.”

“You’re not married, Mr. Brown?”

He looked up from his pad. “No, ma’am, not currently.”

“What a shame to have a nice eligible bachelor going to waste, so to speak. Of course, I speak only as a confirmed spinster who abhors that sort of thing. No prospects?”

“Huh? Why—” Tip Brown hesitated.

“There are lots of pretty girls around the studio. The secretary in Mr. Cushak’s office seemed to me to be the type who’d be attractive to men….”

“Joyce?” He laughed. “The man-eater? Oh, I admit that once I gave her a slight whirl. But it’s my private opinion that underneath it all she’s still carrying a torch for Larry Reed; she was married to him for a while some time back. Anyway, we had a lot of laughs but we didn’t hit it off. But I’ll admit—” here Tip Brown grinned almost sheepishly—“I’ll admit that there is a long tall blonde on this lot with whom I would willingly make a trip to the altar on ten minutes’ notice. But she seems to prefer musicians, dammit.” He sighed.

“‘Faint heart …’” quoted Miss Withers, ever the hopeful matchmaker. “Why don’t you send her flowers?”

“I’d rather send that musician some henbane blossoms,” Tip said fervently. “Him and his fancy Harvard accent! But enough of my broken heart. To get back to the epic—the poodle lives out of garbage cans and picks up a few pennies by dancing on street corners. His coat grows out so he looks like a sheep dog. Winter is here and he almost freezes; comedy-pathos stuff with icicles goes in here. Comes early spring and it’s time for Jingling Brothers Circus to open at Madison Square Garden—or maybe we have it somewhere in the suburbs under the big top. Anyway the pup drifts in and hangs around the mess tent, half-starved and looking for a handout. Comedy scene where he looks at an elephant and thinks he could swallow it whole. Finally the ringmaster sees him and figures an angle. I guess the ringmaster would be Willy Wombat—no, Harry Hawk would be better, with a sneer and a black-snake whip. Sam and Sally Sparrow are aerialists, Herman Hippo is the clown. The poodle is given a new screwy haircut like this one—”